“What’d I miss?” – Week of May 25th

As usual there were a lot of things happening this week in healthcare, and not all of it was technology related. Here’s a quick look at some of the stuff I browsed this week.

Night at the Museum was #1 at the box office over the weekend. This is a little surprising as I thought for sure Terminator Salvation would take the honors. You can bet my girls and I will be sitting in a theater this weekend watching Night at the Museum.

Engadget reported that the most anticipated new eReader in a long time has added 3G. I’m speaking about the Plastic Logic ebook Reader. The device looks incredible and should offer a great reading experience, even for documents in PDF format. I love ebook readers and am sorry to hear that the Plastic Logic is not slated for release until 2010. On a side note, when is someone going to create an e-ink monitor (desktop or laptop)? I spend anywhere from 10 to 16 hours a day on a computer. LCD screens are great, but it’s like looking into a flashlight all day. I don’t even need color, just something crystal clear that won’t make spots appear in my vision when I forget to blink.

The Annals of Pharmacotherpy reported that “Medication Reconciliation Performed by Pharmacy Technicians at the Time of Preoperative Screening resulted in a statistically significant decrease in medication discrepancies.” – This is an interesting development and one that could be potentially useful in an acute care setting. Pharmacy technicians are under utilized. Utilizing them to their full potential (read as legal limits) means more freedom for pharmacists to do what they need to do.

TabletKiosk Blogspot had an interesting article on whether or not netbooks are suitable for business users. “However what I find the most interesting is that because of the features and services that TabletKiosk and the other enterprise manufactures offer, we rarely hear customers mentioning netbooks as viable solutions to their business needs. In our niche world, the same customers who use an apple iPhone with capacitive touch for their personal use specifically request resistive touch for their work machines because they often wear gloves when operating our devices. Pan scrolling is cool and it’s fun, but for simple, menu-driven applications, it’s just another bell and whistle that is not needed to get the job done.” – I want a netbook.

Tangent announced the The Medix 10T tablet. It reminds me a lot of the Motion C5 by Motion Computing. My hospital invested in the Motion C5, and I had the opportunity to carry one around for a week or so. In general, tablet computers get a big “thumbs up” from me, but I wasn’t all that impressed with this one.

I discovered a new website: barcode.com. This site contains more than information on barcoding. Check it out.